slowly, slowly, very slowly…

Where I am now the internet is only dial up and thus very slow. I hoped to reply to all the nice comments which you left to my last to posts but it is hopeless. So let me thank you in this way at least!!!

I also wanted to upload loads of pictures, but it will have to wait. I met a lady, a lovely family friend working in The Slovak National Gallery in Bratislava who has a great collection of traditional slovak textiles. Yesterday me and my sister took (us and our children to The Slovak National Museum and from both visits I made a lot of pictures to show you our traditional embroidery mainly. I have read in one book that nowhere in the world there was such a variety of different techniques and patterns in such a small area like here in Slovakia. I don´t know if it is true or not.

The weather cooled down immediately after I wrote my last post :). Doesn´t it usually happen to you as well? The temperature dropped from over 30 to 15 degrees after huge  storms (which even killed a mother, daughter and severely injured a father who went for a trip to the hills around 40 miles away from where we are). It sounded like if it was a war time. Uh, I am not used to this anymore and my older daughter was scared very much too. And the little one was comforting her with words: “You don´t have to be scared, I am here with you!”

From Far Away

All my dear friends, those I know in person as well as those I know only “on-line” and to all whom I don´t know but who are reading this… I am sending you a lot of very warm and summery greetings from the centre of Europe. Warm, because I haven´t forgoten you at all! and warm - well, because it is very warm here indeed! The temperature is around 25, more often 30 degrees and I feel half cooked. Our days are filled with a lot of splashing and swimming, sunbathing and above all  chatting with all our dear family and friends we haven´t seen for over two years. Precious moments.

As I am now more or less a guest most of the time I am free from cooking and a houswork which gives me more time to be with the girls and sometimes do some reading and scribling in my sketchbook and thinking and rethinking my life as a mum and “an art student”. This is a time for me just to “be” rather than “do”.

Wherever you are and whatever the weather is I wish you a lot of happy moments!!! oxo

Before I go…

It is that time of a year when we go for holidays - far away or just some miles away… We go home - from home. If home is where the love is then we have got at least two homes, here in Scotland and there in Slovakia.

But before we go I will show you what I did next to all packing and tidying and preparing: yesterday it was again feltmakers get together in our area and I have made my first pair of slippers, under a guidance of an experienced feltmaker Greta Bergman. Thank you, Greata, for sharing your knowledge with me! I enjoyed the process and would like to experiment more with the shape and texture next time.

 

I wish you a nice summer time wherever you are and wherever you will go!!! I hope to keep in touch with you somehow in the midst of all travelling, either through this blog or through the Flickr. But, we shall see…oxo

Take it Further June

…is about STASH as something which is full of possibilities and potential.

I have been thinking about the word stash, what is it? A piece of fabric or thread, my (quite unused) paints and brushes, papers and wool and dyes… nettle in the garden, gorse behind it… rusty metals or wilted flowers I could “dye” with, used tea bags, onion skins, shells from a beach …

…all full of POSSIBILITIES, which seem to be endless…

…they often take my sleep away, but not my DREAMS…

100 % cotton t-shirt dyed with tea bags, colour modified with iron, handpainted, felted flower with a safety pin on the back. Better pictures to come :), if it doesn’ t rain again. But if it does I will have the right kind of water for dyeing with brazilwood! Is the rainwater stash as well???

Edges

I was experimenting a little bit with different edges I could create when felting. This is just  a little sample where the orange fibre is laid horizontaly and the white fibre verticaly.

And this is a finished scarf (is there any other name for something like this?). The edges are floppy and there is a double layer at the bottom. It is wet felted as one piece using merino and other animal and man made fibres. So far it is white. I might dye it at some point, but because I am only learning now I like to use just simple white and not be distracted by the colour. After all I think it is nice even as it is, could be worn by a bride :).

 

 

Wool related

I have been carding the wool I dyed. First I tried hand carders, but it seemrf neverending plus I wasn´t happy with little batts I would was getting. I wished to have slivers again so that I could easily pull wisps of fibres. I would not have been carding unless I have met such a generous artist and feltmaker as Joni Phippin  is. She lives in the same town and willingly offered me her drum carder to try it out before I decide if I buy  one for myself or not. I am very gratefull to her, since I not only have the dyed  merino  in a sliver form again, but I could also learn how to blend different fibres. I have watched a helpful set of tutorials on You Tube, the first part starts here.

On the above picture you can see merino dyed with gorse plus silk hankies added - pale yellow, the orange one is dyed with madder, the greenish yellow is stinging nettle and yellow orrange is gorse, maddr and gorse dyed silk hankies blend.

And then I was back felting. The following cape went to a little girl celebrating her 3rd birthday. It well fits even my older daughter.  Again I layered the finest merino, plus a bit of madder mohair on the top of our dinning table. This time I embellished it with the holes, which I made pushing the wet fibres apart with a sharp end of scissors and my left pointer.

 

This picture shows other feltmade things, but I can´t show you more since they are also gifts and I don´t know if the recepients are not lurking around :). So once they are with their owners, I will show you more. The coloured ones are made from blends of at least 4 different fibres, all either natural shades or dyed with natural dyes. Oh, no, pardon, the bluish one is synthetics.

If I could I would dye and felt aaaaall day long… I am very tired but very happy too.

Yellow in Scotland (part 2)

continued from here

Believe me or not I have been as excited (and impatient) as you to see this finished. And it is here, I have made it!!! I am as happy as the colour of this jacket looks happy! So here you can see my first felted jacket in full glory :). It is made of merino 21 micron which I dyed with various dye plants (gorse, broom, daffodil, dandelion) and embellished with silk threads and brownish tapestry wool cut into little pieces. Just what I had on hand.

It is not without mistakes, of course, but I have learned couple of important things about wool again, the shrinkage and especially how to work the seams. I haven’t felted it in one piece, I was trying to use my half felted dyed merino so made four pieces of fabric and then felted the seams together. Because the pieces were already felted it was more difficult to join the seams (overlaping one over another) than if I worked just with prefelts. And it is a bit smaller than I planned, but, as you can see, it is still wearable.

I have been working on this for five days, every day one or two hours, as I could. That’s what I find difficult about felting bigger pieces: one needs a lot of time to finish it since the wool shouldn’t be left soapy for too many days. I am going to wear it now and see how durable my felt is.

Have a good week all of you!!!

……………..still felting………………….

Thank you very much to all of you for your encouragement! Uh, I need it when I see so much wool to be felted.
The batts which you can see here are cca 200 g and yes, I have already felted all of them yesterday and today. But because it was partially felted it wasn’t sooo hard and then I did not have to lay the fibres which I find the most time consuming.
I have died once with dyer’s broom, once with dandelions and daffodils and three times with gorse. I  have much more yellow fibre left (some I dipped in the madder dyebath to exhaust it so are a bit orangish), but most of them has to be carded. And I have some “madder” batts as well.

Tomorrow I hope to cut out individual pieces for the jacket/cardigan and felt them together. I am thinking of a wool like it was a glue - wool joins/traps “things” together, doesn’t it?

I wish one day I will be able to felt a jacket as one piece…

Yellow in Scotland (part 1)

Right behind our house there is a field full of yellow dyeplants: dyer’s broom and gorse. But it is actually everywhere you look now in Scotland. So beautiful! And so great to have such stock of a yellow dye right at the doorstep. It means that I can experiment for free.

I have dyed with gorse again. I love the yellow it gives. Non of the pictures depict it well, it is baby yellow, soft yellow colour which turns into egg yolk yellow after washing soda dip, or even darker, depending on the dyeplant:fibre ratio.

I have tried dyer’s broom as well. It is supposed to contain the same yellow as historical dye weld, but in smaller amount per square meter. Oh, but here are hundreds of meters of it here right now. The yellow is brighter that the yellow from gorse, more greenish. And if the fibre is left in the dyebath longer the colour dulls (as in my case, I haven’t read the recipe properly. No wonder I am not a great cook. But I might be after all this dyeing :).

And because I wasn’t very gentle to the fibre, most of it felted more than “healthy”. No pulling wisps or tufts. First I thought I would handcard it. Then I decided to just spread individual slivers into sort of pre-felts…

…. and have quite a few bats.

I would (o, o, o!!!) like to try to make a jacket out of them. So now I am off to felt. I will be back when “the thing” is done. Fingers crossed there will be part 2 to this post.

Dyeing workshop

Last week I had a rare opportunity to leave the girls with our mum and go to a natural dyeing workshop at Croft 7. It was sunny and I enjoyed quiet driving in the countriside. And the Croft is situated in such a lovely corner of the Highlands nature!

Sheila, who is a textile artist and feltmaker,  was teaching how to dye with daffodils and lichens. I already knew something from the books but it was great to see how someone experienced does it. Plus I have learned couple of very important facts:

1. that where I can get some of the material locally. Like e.g. my alum at a chemist (and yes, I just have a new Alum stock from Boots, they didn’t have it but ordered it for me. It was cheaper than from an on-line dyeing supplier plus I didn’t have to pay the postage and had it quickly.)

2. I need to be as gentle as possible whenever wool gets in contact with water. I read it in the books but didn’t pay much attention. I simply presumed that once wool gets wet felting is inevitable. It doesn’t have to be so. So now when I soak the wool or dye it I really try not to move it too much plus to keep the teperatures of different baths similar and not to “shock” the wool. And I have already seen results. The last batch of merino was so soft that I didn’t have to card it and I could easily pull wisps from the sliver. It is a great relief, I was worried I would have to card all the wool I naturally dye…

 

The workspace. On the right different mordants.

 

On the left merino dyed with daffodils. On the right merino in the dyebath made from lichen called “old men’s beard”.

Sheila’s beautiful samplers! Two more pictures here and here . Hopefuly there will be more days like this in the future. If you are from somewhere around check their website for more workshops!